X-bit labs

ATI RADEON 9500, RADEON 9500 PRO, RADEON 9700 vs. NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4200 and GeForce4 Ti4600

Category: Video

by FastSite

[ 12/25/2002 | 12:00 AM ]

At present there are two players in the today's gaming graphics cards market that determine thesituation. They are ATI and NVIDIA, two uncompromising rivals, which have been competing with oneanother for years. Today we will witness the battle between the newest graphics chips from ATIand their direct competitors from NVIDIA. Who will win?

Table of contents:

• Closer Look: ATI RADEON 9700, 9500 Pro and 9500
  
• ATI RADEON 9700
  
• ATI RADEON 9500 Pro
  
• ATI RADEON 9500
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Performance
  
• Synthetic Benchmarks
  
• 3D Gaming Benchmarks
  
• Conclusion
  

At present there are two players in the today's gaming graphics cards market that determine the situation here. They are ATI and NVIDIA, two uncompromising rivals, which have been competing with one another for years. ATI has been very successful lately. The successful launch of their RADEON 9700 Pro pushed ATI to the leading positions in the High-End expensive gaming graphics cards market sector. The direct competitor to ATI RADEON 9700 Pro from NVIDIA, the new GeForce FX chip, which also supports DirectX 9, hasn't appeared yet.

Therefore, the newest ATI chip is now opposed by NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600, and of course, the latter gets completely defeated by ATI's baby, which is not at all surprising.

Graphics cards based on ATI RADEON 9700 Pro and NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600 belong to the fastest and most expensive gaming solutions today. However, to get the highest profits possible, the companies should definitely have the whole family of graphics products, so that they could satisfy the needs of hardware enthusiasts ready to pay any money for extra performance and at the same time become a good choice for those, who look for some better value solutions. NVIDIA created this graphics cards family long time ago, so that the announcement of the new GeForce FX only added the very top model to it.

ATI, however, hasn't been as successful here until recently. Namely, their new 3D-graphics king, RADEON 9700 Pro, competes with the not yet existing GeForce FX, while the fastest solution of the previously launched models, RADEON 9000 Pro, is capable of competing only with NVIDIA GeForce4 MX440-8x. In other words, the entire NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4200-Ti4600 family hasn't faced a worthy response from ATI.

However, not so long ago ATI announced a few new chips, which were intended to occupy the free spots in their product range. ATI claimed that the new chips were simpler and cheaper modifications compared with their performance leader, RADEON 9700 Pro, though they were still based on the advanced R300 architecture.

As a result, the complete family of R300 based products from ATI now includes the following items according to the official data:

• ATI RADEON 9700 Pro. It features 8 pixel pipelines, 256bit DDR SDRAM graphics memory bus, 325MHz recommended chip frequency and 620MHz (310MHz DDR) recommended memory frequency.
  This is the fastest and most expensive modification. RADEON 9700 Pro chips helped ATI to win the leadership in the 3D graphics market at least until NVIDIA GeForce FX comes out. The graphics cards based on ATI RADEON 9700 Pro started selling in mass long time ago.
  ATI positions its RADEON 9700 Pro as a competitor to the upcoming GeForce FX chip from NVIDIA.
• ATI RADEON 9700. It features 8 pixel pipelines, 256bit DDR SDRAM graphics memory bus, 275MHz recommended chip frequency and 540MHz (270MHz DDR) recommended memory frequency.
  This version differs from ATI RADEON 9700 Pro only by somewhat lower working frequencies. ATI positions its solution as a competitor to NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600 and its AGP 8x version.
• ATI RADEON 9500 Pro. It features 8 pixel pipelines, 128bit DDR SDRAM graphics memory bus, 275MHz recommended chip frequency and 540MHz (270MHz DDR) recommended memory frequency.
  ATI claims that its RADEON 9500 Pro features 128bit DDR SDRAM memory bus. If we take it for granted, then the only difference between this product and ATI RADEON 9700 will be exactly this twice as narrow memory bus.
  RADEON 9500 Pro is positioned as a rival to NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4200 and partially as a rival to a faster GeForce4 Ti4600.
• ATI RADEON 9500. It features 4 pixel pipelines, 128bit DDR SDRAM graphics memory bus, 275MHz recommended chip frequency and 540MHz (270MHz DDR) recommended memory frequency.
  This is the slowest chip of the entire ATI family. With twice as few pixel pipelines as by RADEON 9700 Pro, twice as narrow memory bus and lower working frequencies, RADEON 9500 can only compete with the NVIDIA GeForce4 MX family and a little bit with GeForce4 Ti4200.

The launching of the new chip modifications, the situation in the gaming graphics cards market can change significantly in ATI's favor. Today already the company boasts the whole variety of graphics chips covering evenly all the price categories of the today's market and supporting DirectX 9, which is very important.

As for their major competitor, NVIDIA, they seem to be expecting only two versions of their new GeForce FX to be coming out soon. These versions will only differ from one another by their clock frequencies. They are most likely to be competing only with ATI RADEON 9700 Pro, as this is the fastest ATI's solution so far. As for other newcomers from ATI, the good old NVIDIA buddies, such as Ti4200-Ti4600, will have to struggle with them.

So, our today's article sets the following goals. With the help of ATI RADEON 9700 Pro based graphics cards and the recently announced ATI RADEON 9700, RADEON 9500 Pro and RADEON 9500, we will get acquainted with the peculiarities of the new chips and will try to figure out how attractive the news cards are compared with the rivalry products from NVIDIA, namely GeForce4 Ti4200/Ti4600. The features and specifications of ATI RADEON 9700 Pro and R300 architecture have already been discussed in great detail in our ATI RADEON 9700 Pro Graphics Card Review. Therefore, today we will touch only upon the performance of the graphics cards based on the new ATI's chips.

Closer Look: ATI RADEON 9700, 9500 Pro and 9500

Before passing over to the new graphics cards, I would like to offer you the pictures of the PowerColor Evil Commando 2 graphics solution following the RADEON 9700 Pro reference design from ATI. This will allow me to refer to ATI's reference design hereinafter when we consider the new products exterior and features. Here it is:

   

So, let's have a closer look at the new graphics cards one by one.

ATI RADEON 9700

The graphics card based on this chip is the new Sapphire RADEON 9700 128MB:

   

Breaking the funny tradition of painting ATI based solution with red color, which is so typical of all the graphics cards makers, Sapphire colored it with radical black. The cooler on the graphics chip is also far from being standard: the heatsink is made of some surprisingly hard compound, and its ribs form some kind of a funnily shaped oval. The fan, however, deserves even more attention: judging by the sticker, which says "Cera Dyne Bearing", the fan axis is provided with extremely long-lasting ceramic bearings. As for the noise, I cannot be very positive here, as when this card from Sapphire is installed vertically (like in the testbed, for instance), the fan hardly produces any noise, but once you install it into its standard position inside the PC case with the fan facing the bottom of the case, then.. Well, then this cooler starts generating some very unpleasant loud whistling sounds.

The layout of Sapphire RADEON 9700 graphics card is nearly identical to the reference design of ATI RADEON 9700 Pro, with the exception of only one fragment located on the front side of the PCB around S-Video connector.

The card is equipped with D-Sub, S-Video and DVI-I connectors. It features 128MB in 256bit DDR SDRAM chips from Hynix with 3.6ns access time:

The card's working frequencies fully correspond to ATI's recommendations: 275MHz chip and 540MHz (270MHz DDR) memory frequencies.

ATI RADEON 9500 Pro

This chip will be represented by Sapphire RADEON 9500 Pro 128MB graphics card:

   

As you can see from the picture above, here sapphire decided to refrain from experiments with the PCB color and chip cooler. So, its graphics card looks like many other ATI based solutions.

However, the design of this product differs quite significantly from the reference RADEON 9700 Pro from ATI. The memory chips are moved to the upper part of the PCB and are located in two rows: one row on the front of the card and another one of the back.

The most interesting question, however, which concerns everyone familiar with RADEON 9500 Pro is the memory bus width of these cards. I think that I can now answer this question: it is 128bit DDR SDRAM. How could this only happen? The card is equipped with 8 32bit chips, which will provide the total bus width of 256bit!

Let's figure out what's the matter here. At first have a look at a picture from the Hynix chips documentation, as these are the chips used on our graphics card:

Here you can see the typical load scheme for the data bus signal line.

And now come the PCB close-ups of ATI RADEON 9700 Pro and ATI RADEON 9500 Pro. The elements responsible for the workload are marked with arrows:

ATI RADEON 9500 Pro

ATI RADEON 9700 Pro

Each of these elements is a combination of four resistors, which means that each of these elements loads four signal lines. By ATI RADEON 9700 Pro there are 8 elements like that near each memory chip, and by ATI RADEON 9500 Pro - 4 elements. As a result, if we simply calculate the total number of combinations like that (just multiply by 8, as both cards feature 8 memory chips each), we will get the following numbers: the PCB of ATI RADEON 9700 Pro will have 256 signal lines loaded to their utmost, which corresponds to the 256bit memory bus mentioned in the specs, while ATI RADEON 9500 Pro will feature 128 signal lines, which corresponds to the 128bit memory bus.

In order to arrange a 128bit memory bus of 8 32bit chips, ATI engineers decided not to use 32bit chips as if they were 16bit ones (and in fact they could hardly do that at all). Instead they organized this memory in dual-line manner, i.e. with two physical banks.

A very similar example can be found in Intel's official document describing the structure of a regular unbuffered PC133 memory module:

Here, the 8 16bit chips are combined not into a 128bit bus (8 x 16), but into a 64bit one. In case of ATI RADEON 9500 Pro the scheme will look just the same, with that only difference that we will have 32bit chips instead of 16bit ones and the data bus will be a 128bit one, instead of 64bit.

By the way, dual-line memory structure is not such a rare thing for graphics cards. For example, 64MB cards based on KYRO II chip features the same memory organization. Moreover, why don't you ask any questions about the bus width by NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600, if the cards based on this chip are equipped with 8 32bit chips?

So, ATI's statements about RADEON 9500 Pro featuring a 128bit memory bus got absolutely true. As a result there are no ways to turn your RADEON 9500 Pro into a RADEON 9700 with a "fully-fledged" 256bit bus. This is simply impossible because the card has a physical 128bit bus, and not an "artificially slowed down" 256bit bus.

Our ongoing tests will show how the twofold reduction of the memory bus width influenced the performance of ATI RADEON 9500 Pro.

The card is equipped with a D-Sub, S-Video and DVI-I out. It features 128MB of 128bit graphics DDR SDRAM by Hynix boasting 3.6ns access time.

The working frequencies of the card's chip and graphics memory fully meet ATI's recommendations. They are equal to 275MHz and 540MHz (270MHz DDR) respectively.

ATI RADEON 9500

ATI RADEON 9500 chip will be represented by Gigabyte MAYA II RADEON 9500 64MB graphics card:

   

This card uses one more design version, which is nearly identical with the ATI RADEON 9700 Pro reference design. The differences can be seen, for instance, in the upper left corner of the back side of the card: the graphics memory voltage regulator by Gigabyte MAYA II RADEON 9500 is designed in a different way. Also, you can see some differences in the way the components are positioned around the AGP connector of the card,

As for the memory bus width, there are hardly any questions here: the PCB layout of our Gigabyte card and the layout of the ATI RADEON 9700 Pro based reference solution is absolutely the same, that is why the 64MB RADEON 9500 with only half of all memory chips (four 32bit chips onboard) features a twice as narrow memory bus: 128bit only.

However, if we take a 128MB version of an ATI RADEON 9500 based graphics card, the situation will no longer be so simple. They seem to be having a fully-fledged 256bit memory bus, as eight 32bit memory chips positioned just like by ATI RADEON 9700 Pro will build exactly the 256bit memory bus. In this case the card will be able to strike all of us with unbelievably high performance, which would be untypical of the cards from its price group. In this case ATI will have either to refrain from producing 128MB solutions based on this RADEON 9500 chip, or to equip these cards with 4 memory chips of higher capacity, or, if they still put 8 memory chips onboard, to slow down the cards artificially by increasing the memory timings, introducing empty clocks, etc.

Anyway, let's return to our 64MB version. Gigabyte MAYA II RADEON 9500 is equipped with a D-Sub, S-Video and DVI-I Outs. It is provided with 64MB of 128bit graphics DDR SDRAM chips from Hynix featuring 3.6ns access time:

The graphics card clock frequencies fully comply with ATI's recommendations, namely it works at 275MHz chip and 540MHz (270MHz DDR) graphics memory frequencies.

The pictures of the graphics chips installed on the new graphics cards are all given below:

RADEON 9700 Pro

RADEON 9700

RADEON 9500 Pro

RADEON 9500

In fact, the exterior of the chips is absolutely identical. They are all marked as R300 and belong to A3 revision. However, it doesn't at all indicate their internal similarity: their marking is still different as you might have noticed. And it is not only the dates of manufacture that are different :)

Anyway, there is only one chip among these four that simply has to be different from all the others. It is ATI RADEON 9500 with only 4 pixel pipelines instead of the 8 pipelines by other chips. The chip we photographed might be the final revision one already with only 4 pixel pipelines. It is also possible that the "lite" version will appear somewhat later if ever, and in the meanwhile they use a regular R300 with "artificially slowed down" or disabled pipelines. In this case we hope that one day we will find a way to enable these pipelines and to eliminate the slowing-down mechanisms, so that to make it a fully-fledged R300 chip.

As for the overclocking of the graphics cards based on the new ATI chips is also a hard nut to crack.

According to ATI's requirements, the cards based on RADEON 9700/RADEON 9500 Pro/RADEON 9500 should be locked against overclocking, just the same way they do it with RADEON 9000. They resort to this measure to retain the initial positioning of these cards in their price groups, and to prevent the graphics card makers from cheating on them by selling, say, "ATI RADEON 9700 Pro based cards" built in reality on ATI RADEON 9700 overclocked up to 325MHz.

Nevertheless, two graphics cards of the three tested today were not protected against overclocking. These were the cards on ATI RADEON 9700 and ATI RADEON 9500. I suppose that the cards from the future supplies will have locked overclocking, as the manufacturers do not want to quarrel with ATI in any way. However, there are quite many really sophisticated people among those who buy hardware, so a key to locked overclocking is just a matter of time. New ATI chips boast a more significant performance potential and features compared with the RADEON 9000 predecessor, that is why unlocking them is a much more motivated goal. For example, already now you can download some "hacked" graphics cards BIOS versions, which allow adjusting the working frequencies without any effort at all.

Since overclocking solutions based on new ATI chips is another great review topic, we will not dwell this now. So, stay tuned for more cool info on that, which is most likely to be up shortly after the New Year.

So, now that we have already got acquainted with our today's testing participants, let's have a closer look at their performance.

Testbed and Methods

Our testbed was configured as follows:

• Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz CPU;
• ABIT SR7-8X (SiS648) mainboard;
• 2 x 256MB PC2700 CL2.5 DDR SDRAM by Crucial;
• Fujitsu MPF3153AH HDD.

We used the following software:

• Driver ver.6.13.10.6218 (Catalyst 2.5) for ATI based graphics card for Windows XP;
• Detonator 41.09 driver for NVIDIA based graphics cards for Windows XP;
• Windows XP;
• Direct X8.1;
• 3DMark 2001 SE build 330;
• Quake3 Arena v 1.30;
• Serious Sam: The Second Encounter;
• Unreal Tournament 2003 v.2107.

We used the following settings for our benchmarks:

3DMark 2001 SE:

We set 32bit frame buffer; 32bit textures, 32bit (24bit) Z-buffer.

For High Polygon Count and Vertex Shader Speed tests: 640x480, 16bit textures, 16bit frame buffer, 16bit Z-buffer.

For Fill Rate tests: 1024x768, 32bit frame buffer / 32bit textures / 24bit Z-buffer.

Quake3 Arena:

32bit screen and textures color depth. Maximum graphics quality settings. Tri-linear filtering and texture compression enabled.

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter:

Quality mode: 32bit screen color depth. "Quality" graphics quality settings.

Unreal Tournament 2003 v.2107:

The settings look as follows. Texture Detail: Highest, World Detail: Highest, Character Detail: Highest, Physics Detail: Normal, Character Shadows: ON, Dynamic Lighting: ON, Detail Textures: ON, Projectors: ON, Decals: ON, Coronas: ON, Decal Stay: Normal, Foliage: ON, Tri-linear Filtering: ON.

Performance

Synthetic Benchmarks

This benchmark shows the performance of graphics cards vertex pipelines (processors) when they process a scene with numerous polygons.

The fact that RADEON 9500 chip features 4 pixel pipelines instead of 8 evidently didn't tell on the performance of its vertex processors. ATI RADEON 9700 and RADEON 9500 Pro surely have no reasons to be slow in this test, too.

The performance difference between the graphics cards based on ATI chips is determined mostly by their different working frequencies. That is why all the results got automatically split into two groups: one group includes ATI RADEON 9700 Pro working at 325MHz, and the other one - RADEON 9700/9500 Pro/9500 working at 275MHz.

Vertex processors of R300 core, which are optimized for DirectX9 shaders processing (as we have already discussed in our ATI RADEON 9700 Pro Review), do not perform the functions of the "classical" Fixed-Function T&L unit very efficiently. As a result, NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600 manages to compete pretty successfully with the new ATI chips in High-Polygon Count test.

However in the Vertex Shader Speed test, the newcomers from ATI prove beautifully fast, turning almost twice as fast as NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600.

The results of ATI based solutions are again very clearly split into two groups: ATI RADEON 9700 Pro working at 325MHz and all other chips working at 275MHz.

The texturing speed test included into 3DMark 2001 SE text package is built according to the following principle. Without multi-texturing they draw 64 layers with one semi-transparent texture each, which cover the entire screen. With the enabled multi-texturing the layers get covered with as many textures, as the graphics card can support. As a result, the total number of surfaces reduces. For example, if the graphics card can lay up to 4 textures per pass, the number of surfaces will get 4 times as little, equaling 16, so that the total number of semi-transparent layers could be 64. ATI RADEON 9700 Pro/9700/9500 Pro/9500 based graphics cards support the maximum of 16 textures per pass, so that in tests with multi-texturing the number of surfaces reduces to 4.

The test results prove that ATI RADEON 9500 Pro and RADEON 9500 feature a 128bit memory bus. In work modes without multi-texturing, when drawing each pixel with a semi-transparent texture requires reading, calculating and saving the new value into the frame buffer and Z-buffer, the 128bit memory bus slows down the cards based on the above mentioned chips from ATI.

In work modes with enabled multi-texturing ATI chips lay not a single texture over each pixel, but 16 textures, and the amount of data for the frame buffer and Z-buffer transferred via the memory bus gets 16 times smaller. Most of the data required for the chip to build the scene are textures, which can be cached easily. This allows ATI RADEON 9500 Pro to catch up with RADEON 9700 Pro and RADEON 9700 in multi-texturing tests.

ATI RADEON 9500 features only 4 pixel pipelines and a 128bit data bus, therefore its results are almost twice as low as those of ATI RADEON 9700 working at the same frequencies but featuring 8 pixel pipelines and 256bit memory bus.

In pixel shader speed test almost all new ATI chips outperform NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600 and GeForce4 Ti4200.

The only exception is RADEON 9500, which bottleneck appeared far not the 128bit memory bus, but twice as few pixel pipelines it had. This can be proven by the fact that ATI RADEON 9500 Pro with the same 128bit memory bus but all the 8 pixel pipelines appeared considerably faster.

Here the situation repeats completely. The card based on NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600 managed to defeat only the slowest ATI RADEON 9500. However, the latter still proved faster than the powerful NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4200, which had to build the scene in two passes because it lacked Pixel Shaders v.1.4 support.

As for the gaming 3DMark 2001 tests, I decided to use only Nature, because all other tests do not offer us anything more interesting than the gaming tests do. So, why should we waste our precious time then?

The results in Nature illustrate the performance difference between the graphics cards based on new ATI chips very well. ATI RADEON 9700 falls behind RADEON 9700 Pro just a little bit, which is proportional to their frequencies difference. However, the results shown by RADEON 9500 Pro and RADEON 9500 featuring 128bit memory bus are far behind the two leaders. The scene in Nature benchmark includes a lot of objects with semi-transparent textures (grass, leaves), which leads to much slower performance of the ATI solutions with 128bit memory bus (see the Fillrate test above for more details).

As a result, ATI RADEON 9500 Pro based graphics card yielded in performance to NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4200 with lower chip and memory working frequencies. ATI RADEON 9500 equipped with only 4 pixel pipelines with 1 texturing unit each appeared the slowest of all the testing participants here.

3D Gaming Benchmarks

Quake3 Arena is first of all very demanding towards fillrate, therefore the cards based on ATI RADEON 9700 Pro, RADEON 9700 and RADEON 9500 Pro, which are equipped with 8 pixel pipelines, appeared faster than their RADEON 9500 based counterparts with only 4 pipelines onboard.

The card based on RADEON 9700 is a "fully-fledged" solution, which in fact differs from the card on ATI RADEON 9700 Pro only by the working frequencies, that is why it easily outpaces NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600.

As the resolution increases, the processor's limiting influence gets less significant, and at the same time the requirements to graphics memory bandwidth grow. Therefore, the gap between the graphics cards based on RADEON 9500 Pro and RADEON 9500 chips with 128bit memory bus and those based on chips with 256bit memory bus starts growing as well. Nevertheless, it doesn't prevent ATI RADEON 9500 Pro from defeating the NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4200 based competitor. The solution based on ATI RADEON 9500 still lags behind the others. The matter is that unlike RADEON 9500, NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4200 features 2 texturing units per pipeline, which allows it to outpace the "lite" solution from ATI, even despite higher working frequencies of the latter.

Everything, which we have just said about Quake3 Arena is also valid for Serious Sam: The Second Encounter. However, in Quality mode this game (unlike Quake3 Arena) uses anisotropic filtering. ATI chips lose less performance in case anisotropic filtering is enabled than NVIDIA GeForce4 (see our ATI RADEON 9700 Pro Review for details). So, the laurels here rest with ATI.

The picture remains very similar in Unreal Tournament 2003: ATI RADEON 9700 Pro and RADEON 9700 with 8 pixel pipelines and 256bit memory bus are ahead of all. Then, following NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600, comes RADEON 9500 Pro differing from RADEON 9700 by a twice as narrow memory bus. The last in a row is RADEON 9500, which fell significantly behind even NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4200.

When we tested the cards with forced full-scene anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, we had to give up using the top working modes supported by the testing participants, to make this comparison justified and correct. Instead we tested the products with FSAA 4x and 8x anisotropic filtering (8x Quality by ATI chips).

Full-scene anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering are two major trumps of the new ATI graphics chips family, which got proven by our tests. The enhanced texture caching algorithms, HyperZ III and crossbar memory controller (see our ATI RADEON 9700 Pro Review for details) allows new chips to perform FSAA by means of multi-sampling, so that the performance loss is minimal. Anisotropic filtering performed by R300 chips has its own drawbacks, but the most important thing about it is again very small performance loss caused.

So, all new ATI chips, except RADEON 9500, defeat NVIDIA solutions here. As for the 64MB RADEON 9500, it seems to have a not very well-debugged BIOS or is incorrectly supported by the drivers, because the card stops working properly as soon as we enable full-scene anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering in any modes over 1024x768.

The story repeats: ATI based graphics cards are far ahead of NVIDIA GeForce4.

Unreal Tournament 2003 is also not an exception here. All new graphics cards, except ATI RADEON 9500 based one, are faster than NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600.

Conclusion

Well, no doubt, ATI managed to design a very successful chip family based on R300 architecture. Already now the company boasts the whole set of solutions supporting DirectX9, while NVIDIA will be able to offer only High-End DirectX9 chips in the nearest future if everything goes smoothly.

Very good performance of new ATI chips (RADEON 9700 is faster than NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600, and RADEON 9500 Pro is faster than GeForce4 Ti4200) and simply excellent results with enabled anisotropic filtering and full-scene anti-aliasing will make these solutions really popular very soon. We shouldn't also forget about one more trump these chips boast, but haven't used yet: DirectX9 support.

So, it looks as if graphics cards based on the new ATI chips would be the indisputable hits of winter-spring 2003. It is only important that the prices could go down to an acceptable level as soon as possible. If the new ATI RADEON 9700 and RADEON 9500 Pro based solutions cost less than NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600 and Ti4200, then the latter will hardly be selling well.

Well, we will continue watching the market and invite you, guys, to join us!